It was no doubt, in the first place, a very naughty piece of fun for this scholarly and fastidious art-critic, with a name in Europe for his taste and knowledge of Italian pictures, to find himself exclaiming in rapture over some object as trivial as most of the objects he had up till then dealt in had been rare. He naturally might find this phenomenon absorbing. Theoretically he has no predilections. All flowers are the same. But an especially conscious plant on which he should chance to alight would feel from his method of settling, the character of his tâtonnements, that he had not alighted for the purpose of extracting honey at all. Such a critic, at the same time a dilettante, is not curious about the _object_ that his mind approaches, but is entirely engrossed with _himself_ and his own sensations. It is _amusing_ to flit from petal to petal; the grace with which you alight is amusing; it is amusing that people should suppose that you are engaged in such a dulcet business as gathering honey; to bask in a slightly intoxicating pollen-thickened atmosphere is delicious; but the fun is only to _pretend_ to be a bee. The eclecticism, then, as regards modes and periods of art, finds its natural development in an eclecticism as regards objects. “A man’s head is no more and no less important than a pumpkin,” from the article already quoted. “Objects of the most despised periods may be grist to his (the artist’s) mill.” Should art connoisseurs and dilettantes all turn painters, the sort of art movement they would like to find themselves in the midst of (we are supposing them fashionably-minded, as many are) would be such a giant amateurism and carnival of the eclectic sensibility as we are in for, if the dealers’ riot in Paris succeeds, and if the votaries of Nature-mortism and the champions of the eclectic sensibility here, are to be believed. We see exhibitions of French painting written about in the tone of an intellectual tourist, as though they constituted an entirely new thing in the way of pornographic side-shows, to which the English tripper is immediately led on his arrival in Paris. The “æsthetic thrill” obtained at these shows is described in an eager and salacious key, and with many a chuckle. The truth is that for the amateur turned critic, or the amateur painter, these modern painter’s experiments still remain imbued, as they do for the public, with a great deal of naughtiness. The especially English philandering flapper-sensibility transpires in every sentence of their accounts of shows. There we have then our indigenous æsthete splayed out for our leisurely observation. I will now give you a few lines of an interview with Picasso, which appeared in the _Weekly Dispatch_ of June 1 of this year:-- “Picasso was enchanted with our metropolis (London). He waxed excited over our colourful motor-omnibuses.